Authors Electric

Bruce Nauman, Double Poke in the Eye II, Tate Modern. Photo credit: Karen Kao A while ago, a student asked me to talk about writing dialogue. She felt that her own dialogue was stilted, created solely for the purpose of completing her writing exercise for the week. I said something vague and probably wholly unsatisfactory, although this student was too polite to say so. I think I mumbled something like: use dialogue when it’s the most efficient way to convey your information. When the reader needs to hear the words coming out of the mouth of one of your characters. After class, I went home and started looking at my writing books. As I had hoped, there were plenty of better answers than my flubbed attempt. So here’s what I learned about writing dialogue. Impossible Dialogue Image source: HarperCollins Legend has it that Truman Capote could eavesdrop on a conversation on the street, rush back to his hotel room, and transcribe that conversation verbatim....

When I first moved to the Netherlands, I worked as a translator. A catalogue for the Rijksmuseum, a Ph.D. dissertation on patients’ rights, an environmental law journal. I translated because it was a way for me to learn Dutch, word by word. It felt like an algebra exercise. Each sentence was an equation. All I had to do was work out the variables. hidden works In my second job as a lawyer , I continued to translate though the work got a lot harder. I explained to foreign clients how Dutch law worked, using words borrowed from another legal system. That’s a tricky thing to do. Legal terms come with deep roots, a judicial pedigree and legislative baggage. It’s not enough to know the words in order to translate. Now that I’m on my third career as a writer , I am in awe of translators. I love to read about peoples, places and times that are not my own. Nine times out of ten, you’re talking about a work in translation. It could be Spanish or Japanese or Danish. And since...

Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. Thus intones the website mindfulness.org . Google the word mindfulness and you’ll find a world of coaches and retreats, a series of TED Talks and even The Mindfulness App . It all sounds pretty goofy to me. I’m here, aren’t I? What more do you want from me? But lately I’ve been thinking about how much my life has changed over the past 7 years. How much I’ve changed. Was it quitting my law practice or starting to write that did the trick? Somewhere, somehow, along the line, mindfulness entered my life. hibernation Marcel Proust. Image source: https://www.poetrychangeslives.com/ways-of-writing/ In the winter, I spend most of my time in bed. Some of that is sleep but most of it is reading and writing. I like to write with my papers and books and photographs spread out around me, the cat curled ...

Eighteen months, I gave a master class on novel writing at the International Writers’ Collective. Because my debut novel is set in Shanghai 1937, we spent a little time talking about the historical research that went into The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . Out of fear of disappearing into the research rabbit hole, I decided to write the story first and figure out the facts later. That seemed to make a lot of people in the audience happy. I think I made writing historical fiction sound easy. Did I mention all the rewriting? a slow learner I made some major historical mistakes in that first draft of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . They ranged from setting my novel during the wrong Sino-Japanese War to misusing the term for those body-hugging dresses worn in 1930s Shanghai. Fixing all those gaffes required a full-on, page 1 rewrite. In fact, if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that 90% of what I wrote for The Dancing Girl and the Turtle , I threw away. And what was l...

Memoir is hot these days. At least, it was last year around this time when Michelle Obama’s Belonging was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Educated , a memoir written by Tara Westover, followed close behind. Soon thereafter, I sat in on a memoir writing class. Not because I wanted to write my life’s story but to cheer on the teacher, Ellen Keith, a fellow faculty member at the International Writers’ Collective . Memoir belongs to the genre of creative nonfiction , a broad tent that holds many circus animals: personal essay, travel narrative, memoir, blog, and autobiography. Unlike autobiography, which generally spans an entire lifetime, memoir is more thematic, focusing on a particular phase. It uses the same building blocks as fiction: a strong narrative voice and a story told in scenes. It made me wonder: where does memoir end and fiction begin? Then Ellen distracted me with a hermit crab exercise. Hermit crab essays adopt already existing forms as ...

Finding a good critique group is hard work. Get into the wrong one and it’s easy to have your ego bruised or to lose your writing mojo. Some writers hate critique groups while others swear by them. How does a writer choose? NaNoWriMo 2016. Image credit: Terry Chay First off: let’s get our definitions straight. There are writing groups and critique groups. The former is a convivial place where writers can gather to write in each other’s company. Sometimes there’s chatter but mostly it’s about getting words on the (virtual) page. There are international events like NaNoWriMo and there’s the local coffee shop on Thursday mornings. A writing group, in my book, is about moral support. A critique group, on the other hand, is where members are expected to point out the flaws in a manuscript. That manuscript might be a couple of pages to read on the spot or ten thousand words circulated a week in advance. It may not be the same people around the table from one time to the ...

I’m turning into a craft-obsessed monster. Everywhere I look, I see POV, narrator, mood, tone and voice. I blame this hideous transformation on my writing workshop . Each week, our teacher gives us a new set of craft techniques to apply to our writing. I’ve been using this opportunity to overhaul my many failed short stories, looking for a new way into the narrative. POV or point of view is one of those life-and-death decisions a writer must make. Changing that perspective can give a dead-in-the-water story a new lease on life. But how to choose? Shall I tell my story of an adulterous love affair from the perspective of the straying wife, the cuckolded husband, the lover or an all-knowing bystander? Whatever choice I make will, inevitably, influence the reader’s sympathies. To feel pity for poor old Charles Bovary, exasperation with the flighty Emma or disdain for her many lovers. POV options There’s a famous writer who writes his novel from the perspective of eac...

This week marks the second anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. You remember: neo-Nazis, torches, one fatality and a US President claiming “You also had some very fine people on both sides.” Bullshit. But that's not what this post is about. It's about labels, how we use them and, perhaps, how they use us. This is what I wrote on my own blog Shanghai Noir in the days following this horror show. last week  I ran into an article by Lan Samantha Chang entitled Writers, Protect Your Inner Life . Sam’s day job is director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. When school’s out, she gives writing workshops in Paris (2014) and Napa (2016). At Napa, Sam gave a craft lecture on the interior life. She gave us a handout called “Ways to Nurture Your Inner Life”.  3 of the 14 tips involved getting off social media. I thought her article would cover the same territory but I had missed the subtitle . A Writing Life and a Writing Career Are Tw...

The Shanghai Quartet is going to be my magnum opus: four interlocking novels spanning a quarter century of Chinese history. Volume one was my my debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . I’ve just finished the manuscript for volume two, Peace Court . While I await feedback from my beta readers, my mind wanders to volume three. I see Laogai as a collection of interlocking short stories. But what exactly is that and, more importantly, how do I write them? Definition   Writing short fiction is notoriously difficult. You have to accelerate from zero to sixty miles an hour in the space of a few sentences. A short story is often more about what’s not said than what is. According to author Baird Hunter , that’s what makes the short story so powerful. the ambiguities on which short form often insists, in the white spaces of section breaks and in the big dark void at the end. But not all writers can carry off the short form. Author Sonja Chung is embarrassed...